Getting Closer

Grace is 7 months old today. Kind of tough to think about her getting older and all we have is a couple of pictures of her. We wonder how much she has changed since her picture was taken. We wonder if we will recognize her when we see her for the first time and we hope that she is being loved, fed and well taken care of.

We are getting closer though. In fact, a month from today we will be leaving for China. Assuming that everything is still on schedule, we have no reason to believe that it isn't, a month from today we will be getting on a plane to see our daughter's face for the first time. Still no word on our travel visas. We are assuming that everything is fine with the new visa rules or we would have heard something by now. We will probably give the travel agency a call next week if we have not heard anything by then.

This week Jen is on school vacation. She is using the vacation to finish purchasing items from our packing list. Everything purchased has made its way onto the bed in our spare bedroom. The pile of stuff is getting huge and there aren't even any clothes in the pile yet. I was looking through the pile last night and I didn't even know what some of the things she bought were used for. I think we are probably going to have to go through the pile a couple times to trim it down a bit.

We also decided this week to send Grace out a new care package. After we sent our original care package out a few weeks ago I read online that sometimes care packages won't be accepted at the orphanages if there is a dollar value on the customs form. The orphanages have to pay the customs tax on this value so they will sometimes reject the packages. We put a value on the package and noticed when tracking the package that delivery was attempted and was unsuccessful, then a few days later it said it was delivered. Because of this we decided to put another care package together and mailed it out today with $0 value. We hope at least one of the packages will make it there. If they both actually make it there we may even get two cameras full of pictures of Grace.